Genentech and NVIDIA Join Forces for AI-Powered Drug Discovery
American biotechnology corporation Genentech, a key player in research and early drug development and a subsidiary of the Roche Group, has unveiled a strategic multi-year research partnership with multinational technology company NVIDIA, known for designing and manufacturing graphics processing units (GPUs) and advanced software.
This innovative collaboration harnesses the power of Genentech’s artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, coupled with its extensive biological and molecular datasets, and combines them with NVIDIA’s accelerated computing capabilities and AI prowess. The primary goal of the partnership is to accelerate the drug discovery and development process.
Accelerating Genentech’s NVIDIA BioNemo for AI Applications in Drug Discovery
The companies will join forces to accelerate and optimize Genentech’s proprietary machine learning (ML) algorithms and models on NVIDIA DGX Cloud, which provides a training-as-a-service platform built on dedicated NVIDIA AI supercomputing and software, including NVIDIA BioNemo for generative AI applications in drug discovery. NVIDIA will share its computing expertise with Genentech’s teams of computational scientists with the aim of optimising and scaling Genentech’s models, and in that process, may improve or enhance NVIDIA’s platforms.
This partnership is poised to elevate Genentech’s advanced AI research initiatives, with a focus on transforming generative AI models and algorithms into a cutting-edge AI platform. The strategic alignment aims to streamline and expedite the discovery and delivery of groundbreaking therapies and medicines to benefit a global audience. This collaboration marks a pivotal moment in the pharmaceutical industry, signaling a concerted effort to leverage AI for significant advancements in healthcare solutions.
Aviv Regev, EVP and head of Genentech Research and Early Development (gRED) siad:
“By harnessing the power of AI models and algorithms, with our unique data and experiments, we’re unlocking scientific discoveries with incredible speed and generating insights at an unprecedented scale. Bringing science and technology together has always been a foundation of biomedical breakthroughs at Genentech. We are thrilled to join forces with NVIDIA to further optimize our drug discovery and development to deliver treatments that transform people’s lives.”
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA stated:
“The greatest impact of generative AI is to revolutionize the life science and healthcare industry. Our collaboration to create Genentech’s next-generation AI platform will dramatically accelerate the pace of drug discovery and development.”
The collaboration with NVIDIA complements Genentech’s AI/ML teams, which are developing and leveraging AI and ML foundational models across numerous research areas including diverse therapeutic modalities. Genentech scientists aim to glean new insights for target and drug discovery and to answer fundamental questions about human biology and disease.
This partnership will play a pivotal role in expediting Genentech’s “lab in a loop” initiative, wherein extensive experimental data is fed into computational models to unveil patterns and generate novel, experimentally testable predictions. Scientists swiftly evaluate these predictions in the lab, and the outcomes are integrated back into the models to enhance the underlying computational framework, facilitating the iterative advancement of more effective therapies.
The collaborative efforts will leverage both publicly available and Genentech-proprietary data. Genentech retains control over the sharing of its proprietary data, and NVIDIA will not directly access such data unless specifically granted permission by Genentech for a designated project during the project’s term.
Given the lengthy, complex, and uncertain nature of drug discovery and development, predicting targets for new medicines and successfully developing therapeutic molecules is a formidable challenge. Genentech firmly believes that AI, when combined with human expertise, scientific knowledge, and technology, can revolutionize drug development. This collaborative approach aims to enhance predictability and cost-effectiveness, elevate the success rate of R&D in the long run, and ultimately contribute to the discovery and design of therapeutics that significantly improve people’s lives.
About Genentech
Founded more than 45 years ago, Genentech is a leading biotechnology company that discovers, develops, manufactures and commercializes medicines to treat patients with serious and life-threatening medical conditions. The company, a member of the Roche Group, has headquarters in South San Francisco, California. For additional information about the company, please visit http://www.gene.com.
Original Source: Press Release South San Francisco, CA -Genentech – November 21, 2023
Recommended Companies
More Headlines
